Please stop so I can get off for a while.

Not forever. Just for a little bit. Like, maybe somewhere between 20 minutes and 60 days.

Thanks,

Amy

sheslump:

HA! Yes, ^ this.

So I went away from the InterWebs for three days — no Facebook, no Twitter, no Tumblr, no bill-paying.

The first of those days was my Samantha’s 8th birthday. Her summation of the day? “Best. Birthday. EVER.”

The following two days? Working toward making the construction site that is our living room closer to a real, livable room. Like, for example, preparing to put a ceiling back up.

When’s the last time I had an actual ceiling in my kitchen or living room, you ask? Why, that would be about five years ago. The electrical wiring is quite lovely — and, thanks to hard work last weekend, now much safer than it has ever been — but I must say that it’s hard to decorate a room around black wires that look like snakes ready to leap down and bite your head.

I might get a real ceiling soon. *fingerscrossed*

I’m dying from laughter. You’ve gotta read this. *wipingtears*

thejonesfamilyfive:

Last week my mom took my boys downtown for lunch. She watches them for me every Wednesday while I go to work and sometimes she’ll take them out for treats and special meals. This weeks meal was at Berryland Cafe, which is the epitome of a small town diner. Everyone knows everyone and it has actual…

I’m not a big reblogger, and this photo has nothing to do with parenting — although Lord knows my cat has worn his share of hats and shirts stuffed on him by my kids — but this is just too cute!

For the following post, “day shift” = 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. (except for Saturday, when it = 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.) and “night shift” = 3 p.m. to 1 a.m.

So I worked a day shift Saturday, night shift Sunday and I’m working night shift tonight. Then it’s day shift tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday.

If you’re keeping track, that’s day, night, night, day, day, day.

The upside?

I just found out I have nine vacation days left. NINE! VACATION! DAYS!

Which means I promptly whacked off that last day shift this week. Buh-bye, Thursday. Hello, time home on my daughter’s 8th birthday!

Here’s what my kids are doing today:

And where am I?

At work.

I suck. Royally. *sigh*

My 3-year-old, Noah, got to hang out this weekend with one of his best-ever friends, an almost-4-year-old girl named Piper.

Since Noah and Piper were about a year old, they have LOVED each other. We get together with their parents about twice a year, and Noah and Piper spend those times glued together, playing toys and kissing each other.

This weekend, at a Fourth of July picnic, Noah and Piper were sharing a can of soda after an intense play session in a huge sand pile.

As Noah handed the can back to her, Piper said, “Y’know what, Noah? You’re a really good sharer. But you have really little feet.”

I spit out the drink of water in my mouth. Noah said, “Thanks.”

And then they spent the next 10 minutes giggling as they connected random words with the word “poopy” (as in, “Poopy in a rock! Poopy on a dog!”) .

Piper definitely won that game when she blurted out, “Poopy-grass-station!”

We set up a ginormous tent (that we had completely forgotten we owned) in our backyard this weekend for our first-ever Gulli family camp-out.

I live along a creek that runs out of state gamelands, so we had a beautiful setting. Water flowed over the rock dam that some neighbors built. We roasted jumbo marshmallows over a fire set right at the water’s edge. We read library books by flashlight. We played Connect Four (which is quite a feat when you have a 3-year-old “helping” you).

The kiddos even went to sleep easily. Noah put his two fingers into his mouth, sucked on them about four times and started snoring. Samantha made shadow puppets for another 10 minutes or so, then turned off the flashlight, closed her eyes and zonked out.

It was glorious.

I lay there, looking at the stars through the mesh of one window, then dozed off to the sound of gurgling water.

And then Sam cried.

It was somewhere around 1:30 a.m. At first, I did that middle-of-the-night, mostly-still-asleep Mommy patting: Ssssshhhh, there now, sweetheart, it’s OK, you’re fine, go back to sleep.

More crying. Approaching sobbing level.

So I had to wake up a little.

“Whaswrong?” I mumbled in her ear.

“Ihaveabugbiteandit’sreallyitchy,” she mumbled back, getting snot on my cheek.

“ItsOK,” I murmured, trying to scratch it for her.

She snapped up in shock, scaring the crap out of me. “Don’t scratch it!” she sobbed. “That’ll make it WORSE! Then it will spread and get real big and I’M NOT ALLOWED TO SCRATCH THEM!”

*Note to self: Sometimes, what is sound parenting advice at one moment bites you in the ass at another moment.

I’ll spare you the details of the next hour, which involved traipsing into the house with a flashlight, a cold cloth on the bug bite, more sobbing, and some more sobbing.

After much coaxing — and some unfortunate yelling — on my part, Sam finally admitted that she wasn’t crying about the bug bite. She was crying because a bug bite meant there was a bug in the tent that had crawled on her, and she couldn’t bear the thought of going back out and lying back down in a place where there were so many bugs running rampant and, therefore, likely to creep across her skin at any moment.

So our camping adventure ended about six hours early. That’d be about 2:30 a.m., when everybody grabbed their blankies and pillows and went inside to their respective beds.

Maybe I should’ve forced her to face her fear. Maybe I should’ve just zipped her butt into the tent, rolled over and covered my head with a pillow.

To be fair, however, she might have had a point.

When I went out Monday afternoon to tear down the tent, I encountered a rust-colored spider roughly the size of Alaska — OK, that’s an exaggeration; it was more like Texas — that I had to beat to death with my thankfully-handy flashlight.

*Shudder*

I hate bugs.

Parenting magazine recently put out a list of the top 100 cities for families.

I’ll ruin the surprise for you: Washington, D.C., came in first.

The commenters largely rip the list to shreds, saying that whatever 84 criteria were used to rate these cities must have been created by drunken Smurfs.

I’ve not been to most of the cities on the list (I’ve been to D.C.), although I’d certainly be willing to go to Honolulu to verify whether it deserves its No. 7 ranking.

But New Orleans as No. 16? New York City as No. 24? Philadelphia in the top 50? Not so sure about those.

And how big must a city be for consideration on this list? Was my city of Harrisburg, PA, for example, too small to compete?

Thoughts?